Alaska 2018 - Denali National Park

 June 28, 2018

Driving 6000 miles to Denali National Park in order to see Mt. Denali (McKinley) doesn’t mean you will actually “see” Denali.  Two out of three days of the year the mountain is wrapped in clouds and is invisible. At an altitude of 20,310 feet, there can be all kinds of cloud-producing weather going on.  Even down below at 3,000 plus feet where we were in the park, we went from a warm sunny afternoon to a cloudy windy, cold, turning -to- rain afternoon in a short time. Imagine the weather shifts at six times that elevation.

So, yes, we felt as lucky as all-get-out to drive into the Park on a sunny blue-sky afternoon, motor through the 15 miles that cars are allowed to drive beyond the park’s entrance, and there at mile 9.4, off in the distance, snowy white, towering over the other mountains in its range, was Mt. Denali itself. We were star struck.  Even at a distance of about 100 miles, we got a sense of its majestic stature.

We had arrived in Denali National Park about 11:30 a.m. and by stopping at Riley Creek Mercantile learned that both Park campgrounds were full and, in fact, no campsites were available until July 22^nd. I guess this is one time we should have made reservations since we DO like the flavor of camping in national parks. Alas, we would have to be satisfied with camping NEAR the park, and, confident that we would find a campsite from the list of nearby private campgrounds we were given, we stopped at the Wilderness Access Center just up the road from the Mercantile to buy our shuttle bus tickets for the next day. Our tickets would take us 53 miles into the Park to the Toklat River stop, which normally amounts to a 6 ½ hour round trip. To travel to the end of the 93-mile Park road via shuttle bus takes about 12 hours – too long to leave Nina, who would have to spend our touring time in the Siesta in the parking lot of the Wilderness Center.

We then found a place to camp at Grizzly Den Resort and Campground 6 miles south of the Park. It’s a crowded, funky resort on the very fast-moving Nenana River.  A 2-story motel, 10 or 12 log cabins, a few RV sites with hook-ups, and some tent sites under the spruces above the river make up the resort.  One tent site was wide enough (barely) and flat enough to accommodate us for $28/night. We booked it for 3 nights. After a late lunch at our campsite, we drove back to the Park for that first drive on the Park road I mentioned earlier and first view of the mountain. We drove on to Mountain Vista Rest Stop at Mile 13, walked the Mountain Vista Trail, and got another good clear view of Denali. By the time, though, we drove back past Mile 9.4, Mt. Denali had been obscured by clouds.

The next morning our shuttle bus (aka green-painted school bus) departed. You may wonder why it takes 3 hours to drive the 57 miles to Toklat. One reason is the bus stops or at least slows down whenever wildlife appears. A bigger reason is the condition of the road. It’s gravel and when it gets into some elevation, it becomes basically one lane, with lots of twists and turns and a sheer drop-off on one side with busses coming and going in both directions, meeting each other often. Never was I so happy to have by chance taken a seat on the “inside” so I could divert my eyes from our potential dive off the side of the road.

Denali Park Road

And in our case, the normal 6 ½ hour expected time for the trip turned into 8 hours. That’s because an hour out from the entrance, our bus broke down, and Michael and I and a few others decided to walk 2 miles to the next bust stop instead of waiting the hour for a replacement bus. At Igloo Rest Area we got picked up by another shuttle bus – an empty one, with much nicer seats – that took us to Toklat, where we found another bus to take us back to the entrance. It was a long day, but an interesting day. From our bus seats, looking out on mountains, rivers, valleys, rocky outcroppings and tundra, we saw willow ptarmigan, moose, caribou, a gyr falcon and its nest of 3, a northern hawk owl, a bald eagle, two grizzlies, and arctic ground squirrels.

But did we see Denali? Not at all. It was lost in the clouds.

Savage River, Mile 15

Alaska Railroad